Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 (10 page)

The walls will not fall. They are coated in layers of greens and blues and reds and oranges, in spectrums the desert sunset reproduces and where someone does something special, it is sacrosanct. One narrow wall rises over two stories and at the top someone has painted the earth against a backdrop of space and around it, dolphins ring the planet, following each other in a graceful swirl. The painting is pristine.

This is where Sukie comes to think when the images in her head won't settle down enough for her to find them and capture them on film. She comes to the secret place, where the earth smells hot and dry and crumbles underfoot and the rain has not come in many months, and the deep shadowed pools of lime green water send off images of the baths on Olympus. Where the towering columns of art reach against the endless blue summer sky and the crows call overhead, and the brown foothills run like startled jackrabbit backs, and the mountains ring the valley, far away enough for view, close enough for comfort. Where in the hot summer days the sage gives up its intoxicating scent and when wildfires burn they smudge the place and dispel evil influences; where the green green spring willows grow at the edge of the mine, warnings of groundwater and sink-holes. Where the desert sunsets paint the world in colors even Megan couldn't contemplate and ley lines come together, sparking magic; where spirits of sage and wind fill the desert night and the sound of crows is fast and lively and full of that silver desert magic.

Here the crows are silver, the magic is real.

Here the crows are absent, gone to town to experience something new.

Here the magic is so strong, it cannot be captured.

It's been a long day, but a good one. I've got enough assignments to keep me going for a while, and without having to write any articles. Freelance photography doesn't pay what you'd expect, but the articles are a stretch. I've never seen words the right way. I don't hear them—they don't resonate in my mind. I see them like abstract colors, like images I want to shoot and capture, and so I have to wait until they line up on the page just so and try to capture them then. I'm luckier than Megan anyway—she sees color. Sometimes I think she's almost mute, someday could be, locked into her passion and canvas and probably so unaware she wouldn't miss the rest of us. But for all her passion, her wildness, I sometimes think it's Megan who keeps me grounded.

Sukie stops at the little store on her way home. She parks on the side of the building and lets herself in the glass doors. Sukie smells of desert dust and crushed sage, of the hot wind that tangled her hair. Her arms and legs feel crisp and crackly, dried out as if she's covered with caked and flaking mud but really it's just the desert sun and wind have stolen all her moisture. She buys a root beer, knowing the sugar will instantly sweat through her skin, but she needs to shower anyway. The plastic sweats a little against her palm as she makes her way through the aisles. There are fat candles here today, painted with desert scenes, someone else's desert of plains and cacti and pinkish sand. She fingers one gently. Beside it lay beaten-silver wind chimes. She tinks one to hear it resonate inside the store. Sukie smiles and looks across the aisle at notebooks that look like rune books and she's sure if she flipped back the covers fast enough they'd be full of magic, but she'll never be that fast. She toys with the wind chimes but the checks are slow in coming and so she takes the root beer to the counter.

The younger son teases her. Did you find everything you want? Are you looking hard enough? Have you forgotten anything? His hands are quick and he smiles as he rings up the root beer and takes her dollar and hands her back pennies, even though she always throws them in the plastic tray. She's seen the father give the pennies to the children. She grins at him, still thinking about the wind chimes. They're cheap enough. Maybe if a check comes in the next day or two they'll still be there. She doesn't understand why she wants them but they remind her of the desert and the dry hot wind that sings around the forgotten walls.

None of the photos I took yesterday are totally clear. At least none of the photos from American Flats. There are others I took with the same lens, all before, none after, but they're all as crystal as I could ask for. The photos from American Flats have lines of violet in them, zig-zagging scratches like they're overexposed. They have shadows I don't remember and places in them where it seems like there is mist. There's no mist in the July desert. And then there are the crows, standing above the artwork, within the willows, against the bluffs, sailing thermals in that blue, blue sky. I don't remember that many crows when I was shooting.

The mail brings two checks, one of them bigger than I expected. I've got bills, I need groceries, there's my own non-assignment films to be developed, but I instantly think of those silly beaten-silver wind chimes and I'm going to walk down there and get them, only Megan shows up and wants to take me to lunch so we can talk color and substance and art, and she can stop thinking about the employment manual she's illustrating, which she claims is sapping her soul. By the time she brings me back to the house the end of the street is a blaze of red and blue lights and it's too late.

The police don't want to tell her anything. She's not a relative, not a reporter. But she's got a camera around her neck and she stays close to the one camera crew there, standing at the edge of the Do Not Cross yellow police tape and the barricades cordoning off the four way stop.

Just a robbery. Nothing more alarming than everyday metropolitan consumerism in action. Convenience stores are targets, even when they're family owned, not chains, even when there are children with bright voices and dark eyes running in from the alley. Even when the man behind the counter has dark eyes and an engaging smile and he always says something kind.

She waits until the police give out a little bit of information. One gunman, one gunshot, one death. Something inside her falls and Sukie doesn't need to ask who it was. She didn't know his name anyway.

His name didn't matter.

She walks back up the street to home with Megan beside her and later that afternoon, after Megan has gone, she ventures to the front porch to sit with a glass of wine and a sketch pad. She doesn't draw well but she never got to photograph the family. Her pencil just skitters about the page, though, and after a while she starts making lists and then she puts the pad down and just sits, staring off down the street towards the store she can't see through her neighbor's house. The sun is etching tree branches onto the street and the traffic is quiet in the distance and the faintest of desert breezes washes her, bringing the sound of silver from the backyard. Sukie listens, quiet, drowsy in the heat, until the sound makes sudden sense and then she stiffens, listens intently, and rises to go past the overloaded rose bushes and beetle-eaten hostas into the backyard where the plum tree bows under purple bursts of fruit and the wind chimes hang over the patio, stirring softly in the sunset air.

Somewhere in the distance she hears crowsong.

Back out to American Flats to try another couple of rolls. There's something out there she wants to get right. She's not sure what that means. It's rained recently. The ground is patterned where water marked the hardpan. The artwork on the walls has been washed clean, the colors now sparkling in the sunlight. Sukie strolls slowly, listening to the crows, the sound of her home. The sun sinks into her shoulders, relaxing them for the first time since the shooting. She finishes off two rolls, aware this time of the crows around her, and walks past an unidentifiable round structure, liberally held together with paint, its screen still partially in place. At the edge of a rocky incline she stops and sits with her legs sloping downhill in front of her. She faces west, watching the day begin to drain away. After a while a shadow falls across her and Sukie looks up, hardly surprised that he is there. The family has abandoned the store. There are fewer crows waking her at dawn and filling her afternoons. She looks up at the youngest son and he smiles a familiar smile, teasing and light.

"Have you found everything you're looking for?” he asks. “Do you know what you've forgotten?"

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Philip Raines and Harvey Welles

Catchie hears first.

"'Mam! Noisy in the ground!"

Spitmam scoops away sleep and releasing Catchie from her bed grasp, listens for the disturbance beyond the cottage.

"Hear? Under rock, ‘mam! Under and deep, calling to the folk!"

"You say, you say."

In a grumbly witter, Spitmam swings on her longcoat and unlodges the door. The night's cold as groundstone, but Spitmam bends stiff knees to lay an ear to one of the pathway flags.

"You're hearing it,” she tells the girl quietly. “That thumping's surely under. And a grand thing's there!"

They roust their neighbours, going from cottage to cottage, but the folk are already out of sleep. By now, everyone hears the thuds, like a bairn discovering a drum, so they gather shovels, rippers and picks and creep through night. Paddo's the best ears, and the three thin dozen villagers follow him across Cullin's grazing plank, jumping through a small breach in the surrounding dyke, and over the hellafield that pulls from the last cottage up to the lap of the high Cags two miles distant. Paddo leads them in an arc that curves wide round the village til the earth's banging is so loud that the huge flat stones under their feet are waking.

By a ground wave rising dry from boggy reeds, Paddo pricks a spot and like Spitmam before him, makes his sounding by listening against the scrag. “Crack here and right!” he shouts, so the men heft the picks and cut through the peat round the hella, and the women take the rippers and tear the cut apart, and the bairns sweep the tear with shovels and soon a dark hole's cleared. Spitmam has her iron collie, its cup restraining a small fire that's bright enough to light their work, though folk are proper about the fire and put good lengths between it and their fears.

After a spell, they gouge a ten-foot wide ditch and are down through the flinty topsoil to sweet humus. Five, seven, nine feet again, til Aggie's ripper nicks a different layer. “Walloo!” she bellows for the joy of the strike when a bluster from below slaps the tool off her. A second smack and she's rucking her nesting dress and scrabbling up the sides.

"A grand fart!” Paddo clucks.

"Grand?” Aggie says when she's been pulled from the hole. “Find us a monster there!"

So before the folk dig any further, Paddo crawls the length of the ground's pounding with ear down and marks out a square with one of his precise devices and amazes the folk with the scheme. “Paddo?” Pollett cries, “That's to be a hole letting out the world!” But they dig and scrape ten-foot trenches on the three sides of Paddo's square, down five, seven, nine feet, and slowly that deepest layer agrees to a shape.

"There's wings?"

"No, wings don't have scales."

"Never wings—there's tail!"

And it is, the grandest tail any of them has ever seen, beating the ground beneath it. Only Spitmam knows the real name, calling it
fin
. “So's a
fishie
?” Old Solly asks.

"Oh, I'm too tired for naming every new thing to come out of the ground. I'm back for my bed. Girl?"

"Along before you're through sleep!” Catchie calls back to her granny, but Spitmam snorts—her girl's never going back til the last of it—so she covers the collie, slocking the flame now that the sky's grudging enough light for digging, and lurches old back to Cullin's dyke.

Digging passes to quarrying. Derry and his sister, Caff, run back to the tinker, Speg's cottage and return with two kuddies filled of his chisels and the mallets the bairns use for smashing birds’ eggs in the cliff nests. Folk line the trenches and scrub the tail, but as the soil falls away, it flexes and chafes weakly at the edges of the trench walls. Across dawn, New Solly and Speg use straw tethers to tie down the tail so that it doesn't thrash. Quicker now with the tethers, hellas on top of the fishie are pried out and roughed aside and the soil covering the creature's shovelled out. The fishie shivers the rest off its back like an itchy sheep.

Sun over the tallest Cag, only that late do the folk consider what's unearthed.

"There's no fishie!"

"Spitmam says those,
fins
. So—fishie."

"Name's a monster anyway."

The beastie's half under rock and dirt still, but the other half's all odd shape. On its side, there's a white belly, grooved the length of four fat dozen feet from tip to tethered tail. Like a grand muscle of the earth exposed, the body makes a single thrust towards the massy tail, one purpose from which all else is stripped. The head's the tail broken suddenly, smooth, popped with titch eyes and split for a sneer.

"No fishie, tell me now. Watch mouth there, that's fitted for five folk."

"Ten!"

"We keep it half in rock sure, least til the upstander's called down. Kery?"

"Da?"

"Go the pend and tell the fishie to Hammle."

And so. Folk talk big for the fishie's bigness, but as they drift back from the hole along the side trenches, they see the warming Cags, and the whole sky and the wide water beyond the cliffs, and the fishie's just another big thing in the world. The tail stops yoking the tethers and the beastie lays still, its wounds bleeding a fine sand into the ditches. There's speculation about its stone skin—being so queer a granite—but talk drabs, and in ones and twos they scoot away to catch the lost morning chores.

Only three bairns and Catchie stay. “I bet."

"Bet what, Derry?” Rabbie says.

"Bet you—cob or cunt?"

"Derry!” Caff squeals at Derry's swagger, but takes up his game. “Cob, since beastie beetled that ground like you, Derry, bawling for mam during a storm!"

"There's cunt,” Derry declares. “Fishie's got the sense of the lass for being born so far underground. Rabbie?

"Oh—cob."

"Catchie?"

Can't it be something else? Catchie thinks, but before she can make her bet, the bairns are disturbed by Hammle's distant hollering—"Off there sharp, piggots!"—and they scamper sulky off the fishie's huge back.